The Doobie Brothers - One Step Closer

The Doobie Brothers, yeah I know what you're thinking. Actually, I have no idea. More than likely you're asking, "What were you thinking?"

Fair.

As a kid it was "China Grove" that really got under my skin. That riff. Bam! My aunt and uncle had an 8 track copy of The Captain and Me along with a few others that to this day are indelibly stamped into my DNA. It's weird though that I don't remember more about that tape, aside from the weird fades and clicks as it moved from track to track and the cover. Something about that overpass just felt, sad.

There were a few songs by the band I always really liked, but by the time I really got into music, the band was old and tired. Well, old at any rate. They'd been around for years. How old were those guys? I mean, my goodness, I was listening to them when I was ten. Then when Michael McDonald joined the band, things changed. There was a four-year period between 1976 and 1980 when this new brand of Doobie music was striking a balance between blue-eyed soul and rock with groove. This was the commercial peak of the band, and for many, the band's nadir. To me, it's hits and misses. I was sort of partial to the radio hits with Michael singing. I mean, they were catchy.

It was hard to reconcile this soft rock machine as having the same musical core as those early albums. The year was 1980, and the band was back on the charts with One Step Closer, and while it didn't perform to the level of their 1978 release Minute by Minute, it went platinum. But the writing was on the wall, and the band would call it quits in '82 with a Farewell Tour. Yeah, that didn't last forever ... but it was long enough I guess.

I went into this with a bit of a bias, mainly because over the years this era of the band has been so divisive. I was expecting to just take a lot of pithy shots and make fun of the album, but with the passage of time, and having a broader appreciation than I had as a kid, I have to say this surprised me.

It surprised me that this was so popular. Yeah, I know it was the tail end of the '70s soft rock bonanza that would become known as Yacht Rock. I mean, this was soft rock with a lot of breezy grooves, sax solos and some undeniably catchy songs, but it just seemed to be so vanilla. It was like elevator jazz for the cool kids (you know the cool kids weren't listening to this in 1980).

This was my first listen to this album, and I actually really liked this far more than I expected, which actually sort of surprised me. The songs, when they were good, they were really good. The opening to "One Step Closer" still feels like the opening to a television show. More often than not I imagine Don Pardo is about to tell me who is hosting the show.

I was actually just thinking I'd just give it a cursory spin and then make wisecracks that were forty years too late to matter, or be clever. Instead, as I puttered around in the basement, I played the record over and over. Each time I found something else to appreciate. Is this a lost classic? Nah, but it really is enjoyable, and the songs that were radio-friendly back in the day still held a little more appeal to me than I expected.

This was a '70s album that landed in 1980 that marked the end of an era.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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